General life:
Pretty good. You can do most of the general activities you can do in any inhabited system, but the sky is prettier. There's also some interesting stations to visit - a much higher density of unusual ones than in the bubble.
Outfitting:
https://cdb.sotl.org.uk/outfitting and
https://cdb.sotl.org.uk/shipyard summarises what you can obtain locally.
(Plus anything you've unlocked at tech brokers will be available)
Things you need to bring in:
- most A-rated core internals and shields of size 4+
- any superpower-aligned ship hulls (rank-locked or otherwise)
What I'd recommend is to pin a variety of blueprints with the bubble engineers. You can get all the core internals and a bunch of your favourite weapons set up.
Then:
- buy ship and outfit to B/C-grade locally
- remote engineer it up to G4 or even G5 if you want
- visit the local engineers to stick an experimental on it
I've built a mining Anaconda and a general purpose Krait this way and they're both absolutely fine - the performance difference between C-rated and A-rated modules is fairly small, especially once engineered, and the star density is high enough - and the inhabited region small enough - that a B-rated FSD will get you around perfectly well.
Active player groups:
There are a lot of player groups in the region with at least some activity. At the moment the majority of BGS work is on maintenance rather than expansion, because the territory has already been divided - largely diplomatically and peacefully - between the groups.
Additionally, a lot of the systems don't require a vast amount of maintenance, and a lot of the groups are explorers (pretty much by definition all the groups are at least part-explorer, because no-one else would *want* a system out here), so the group might be active but still rarely seen around because they're just using their home base as somewhere to store their gear between expeditions and don't really care who runs the system security.
Still, I'd say there were at least 20 fairly active groups in the region, representing a range of languages and approaches, with various levels of emphasis on the BGS or on non-BGS activities (mainly exploration).
https://cdb.sotl.org.uk/factions has a catalogue and
https://cdb.sotl.org.uk/control might help you get an idea for what sort of BGS activities they have.
